Katie Garrison

• Assistant Professor at University of Alabama

Subjective mental effort is often conceptualized as an inherently costly and aversive phenomenon, but there is ongoing consideration about whether it can also be enjoyable. We explored whether subjective mental effort can be both a pleasant or aversive state depending on how it is conceptualized and measured. Through separate measures, we conceptua...

The sense of autonomy (i.e., having the choice to pursue one’s interests and values) tends to facilitate intrinsic motivation and hedonically pleasant states, though its impact on subjective experiences of mental effort is less clear. In two studies, we examined how autonomy influences subjective mental effort and related mental states during a rea...

Working memory capacity (WMC) refers to the ability to maintain information in short-term memory while attending to the immediate environment, and has been associated with emotional states. Yet, research on the link between WMC and emotion in naturalistic settings is growing and inconsistencies have been observed. In the current study (N = 109), we...

Numerous studies show that perceived authenticity is a reliable predictor of mental health outcomes. To expand on these studies, we examined whether such relations could be due to perceived authenticity’s confounding with both self-esteem and executive functioning. A representative sample of US participants ( N = 446; M age = 46.10; 51.1% female; 7...

How do performance incentives impact subjective experiences of mental effort? Incentives may offset the costs of effort expenditure, resulting in reduced feelings of effort. Or they could lead to an increase in effort expenditure and a corresponding increase in feelings of effort. We tested the influence of incentives on experiences of effort, fati...

It is not always easy to attend to task-relevant information and ignore task-irrelevant distractions. We investigated the impact of task switching and emotional stimuli on goal-oriented selective attention and subsequent recognition memory. Results from two experiments with different stimulus materials (words and images) found that the memory advan...

Some theorizing in clinical and social psychology suggests authentic people lack a self-presentational agenda; however, a small amount of evidence has challenged this idea and suggested authentic people have an agenda to appear authentic. The present study tested this suggestion directly. We assessed whether people higher in authenticity ascribe hi...

Is self-control authentic? Across several hypothetical scenarios, participants perceived impulsive actions as more authentic for others (Study 1a) but self-control as more authentic for themselves (Study 1b). Study 2 partially replicated this asymmetry. Study 3 accounted for behavior positivity because self-control was typically the more positive a...

The current research tested the effects of active choice on memory (i.e., the self-choice effect). Across 14 experiments (N = 1100) we found that memory for choice alternatives was improved by choosing versus being assigned information to remember. A subset of 3 experiments found a bigger self-choice effect for more difficult choices. And a subset...

Acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol, may have psychological effects, such as reducing social and emotional pain. The current study (N = 173) used electroencephalography (EEG) to extend past research on acetaminophen. Healthy undergraduate students (64.7% women, age M = 18.15, SD = 3.33) were randomly assigned to ingest 1,000 mg of aceta...

Working memory capacity (WMC) refers to the capacity to maintain information in short-term storage while processing other information. WMC has been related to higher-order cognitive functions like language comprehension and goal maintenance, and a growing body of research implicates WMC in emotion processes as well. The current research tested the...

Two preregistered experiments with more than 1,000 participants in total found evidence of an ego depletion effect on attention control. Participants who exercised self-control on a writing task went on to make more errors on Stroop tasks (Experiment 1) and the Attention Network Test (Experiment 2) compared with participants who did not exercise se...

Trait self-control correlates with desirable outcomes including physical and psychological well-being and is thought to facilitate the formation of effective habits. Visceral states, including internal drives that motivate specific behaviors, have been found to undermine self-control. The current study tested the hypothesis that individuals higher...

What do emotions do for people? This chapter presents a framework that emotions function much like a precision toolkit, with particular emotions best used to fix particular problems. This means that emotions are not always functional or always dysfunctional. Instead each emotion prepares people to deal with particular issues. The key to promoting f...

Emotional events tend to be remembered better than neutral events, but emotional states and stimuli may also interfere with cognitive processes that underlie memory performance. The current study investigated the effects of emotional content on working memory capacity (WMC), which involves both short term storage and executive attention control. We...

Two preregistered experiments with over 1000 participants in total found evidence of an ego depletion effect on attention control. Participants who exercised self-control on a writing task went on to make more errors on Stroop tasks (Experiment 1) and the Attention Network Test (Experiment 2) compared to participants who did not exercise self-contr...

Individuals often form more reasonable judgments from complex information after a period of distraction vs. deliberation. This phenomenon has been attributed to sophisticated unconscious thought during the distraction period that integrates and organizes the information (Unconscious Thought Theory; Dijksterhuis and Nordgren, 2006). Yet, other resea...

The current study examined the aftereffects of mental effort on the processing of picture stimuli using neural measures. Ninety-seven healthy young adults were randomly assigned to exercise more versus less mental effort on a writing task. Then participants viewed positive, negative, and neutral affective images while P1, N1, P2, N2, P3, and late p...

Adopting expansive (vs. contractive) body postures may influence psychological states associated with power. The current experiment sought to replicate and extend research on the power pose effect by adding another manipulation that embodies power—eye gaze. Participants (N = 305) adopted expansive (high power) or contractive (low power) poses while...